gNewSense was a

Linux distribution A Linux distribution (often abbreviated as distro) is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and, often, a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading on ...

, active from 2006 to 2016. It was based on

Debian Debian (), also known as Debian GNU/Linux, is a Linux distribution composed of free and open-source software, developed by the community-supported Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock on August 16, 1993. The first version of De ...

, and developed with sponsorship from the

Free Software Foundation The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985, to support the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed under copyleft ("s ...

. Its goal was user-friendliness, but with all proprietary (e.g.

binary blob In the context of free and open-source software, proprietary software only available as a binary executable is referred to as a blob or binary blob. The term usually refers to a device driver module loaded into the kernel of an open-source ...

s) and non-free software removed. The Free Software Foundation considered gNewSense to be composed entirely of

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, ...

. gNewSense took a relatively strict stance against proprietary software. For example, any documentation that gave instructions on installing proprietary software was excluded. gNewSense's last release was made in 2016 and it has not had a supported version since 2018.

DistroWatch DistroWatch is a website which provides news, distribution pages hit rankings, and other general information about various Linux distributions as well as other free software/open source Unix-like operating systems. It now contains information on ...

classifies gNewSense as "discontinued".

History

The project was launched by Brian Brazil and Paul O'Malley in 2006. gNewSense was originally based on Ubuntu. With the 1.0 release, the Free Software Foundation provided assistance to gNewSense. With no releases in two years, on 8 August 2011,

classified gNewSense as "dormant". By September 2012 DistroWatch had changed the status to "active" again, and on 6 August 2013, the first version directly based on Debian, gNewSense 3 "Parkes", was released. There have been several indications that it may be restarted, including a website announcement in 2019, but the project has remained inactive, with no releases since 2016. DistroWatch returned it to "dormant" status again in 2019 and "discontinued" by 2022. , the home page of the project's website displayed a blank page with a

meme A meme ( ) is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural i ...

labelling the Free Software Foundation a

cult In modern English, ''cult'' is usually a pejorative term for a social group that is defined by its unusual religious, spiritual, or philosophical beliefs and rituals, or its common interest in a particular personality, object, or goal ...

. After a short time, the website then redirected to the home page of the

PureOS PureOS is a Linux distribution focusing on privacy and security, using the GNOME desktop environment. It is maintained by Purism for use in the company's Librem laptop computers as well as the Librem 5 smartphone. PureOS is designed to inclu ...

website. However, as of June 2021, it now redirects to the FSF's list of Free/Libre distros.

Technical aspects

By default gNewSense uses GNOME. The

graphical user interface The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows User (computing), users to Human–computer interaction, interact with electronic devices through graphical icon (comp ...

can be customized with the user's choice of X display manager, window managers, and other desktop environments available to install through its hosted repositories. The

Ubiquity Ubiquity is a synonym for omnipresence, the property of being present everywhere. Ubiquity may also refer to: * Ubiquity (software), a simple graphical installer made for the Ubuntu operating system * Ubiquity (Firefox), an experimental extens ...

installer allows installing to the hard disk from within the

Live CD A live CD (also live DVD, live disc, or live operating system) is a complete bootable computer installation including operating system which runs directly from a CD-ROM or similar storage device into a computer's memory, rather than loading f ...

environment without the need for restarting the computer prior to installation. Besides standard system tools and other small applications, gNewSense comes installed with the following software: the LibreOffice productivity suite, the GNOME Web internet browser, the

Empathy Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference, that is, the capacity to place oneself in another's position. Definitions of empathy encompass a broad range of social, cog ...

instant messenger, and the

GIMP GIMP ( ; GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free and open-source raster graphics editor used for image manipulation (retouching) and image editing, free-form drawing, transcoding between different image file formats, and more specialized ...

for editing photos and other

raster graphics upright=1, The Smiley, smiley face in the top left corner is a raster image. When enlarged, individual pixels appear as squares. Enlarging further, each pixel can be analyzed, with their colors constructed through combination of the values for ...

. Common

software development Software development is the process of conceiving, specifying, designing, programming, documenting, testing, and bug fixing involved in creating and maintaining applications, frameworks, or other software components. Software development inv ...

tools including the GCC are installed by default.

Installation

The

can be used to run the operating system and to install onto disk. CD images are available for download.

Versions

gNewSense has made four major releases: In 2016, gNewSense announced that the next version of gNewSense would be 5.0.

Comparison with other distributions

Non-free software repositories are not provided by the gNewSense project, and most non-free documentation and artwork have been removed. While it was based on Ubuntu, the "Universe" package repository was enabled by default. In order to avoid

trademark A trademark (also written trade mark or trade-mark) is a type of intellectual property consisting of a recognizable sign, design, or expression that identifies products or services from a particular source and distinguishes them from oth ...

problems that stem from the modification of

Mozilla Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current a ...

, gNewSense 1.1 rebranded it as "BurningDog". BurningDog likewise does not offer to install non-free plugins for various web media, such as

Adobe Flash Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash and FutureSplash) is a multimedia software platform used for production of animations, rich web applications, desktop applications, mobile apps, mobile games, and embedded web browser video players. Fla ...

. gNewSense 2.0 abandoned BurningDog and adopted the Epiphany web browser (later renamed simply "Web"), a component of GNOME, as its default browser application, and came with recommendations and instructions to optionally compile and run

GNU IceCat GNU IceCat, formerly known as GNU IceWeasel, is a completely free version of the Mozilla Firefox web browser distributed by the GNU Project. It is compatible with Linux, Windows, Android and macOS. IceCat is released as a part of GNUzilla, ...

. gNewSense 3.0 retains Web as the default browser, but also comes with a modified version of Debian's Iceweasel that does not offer to access proprietary add-ons.

is another

known for strict licensing requirements and adherence to

principles. While both Debian and gNewSense rigorously exclude non-free software and binary blobs from their official releases, Debian maintains and hosts unofficial repositories of non-free software and

firmware In computing, firmware is a specific class of computer software that provides the low-level control for a device's specific hardware. Firmware, such as the BIOS of a personal computer, may contain basic functions of a device, and may provide ...

binaries, and Debian free software sometimes

depends Depend is a brand of absorbent, disposable underwear and undergarments for people with urinary or fecal incontinence. It is a Kimberly-Clark brand, and positions its products as an alternative to typical adult diapers. Depend is the dominant brand ...

upon or suggests the optional installation of

proprietary software Proprietary software is computer software, software that is deemed within the free and open-source software to be non-free because its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner exercises a legal monopoly afforded by modern ...

, under the theory that users' own informed discretion about the use of such software should be paramount, as expressed in Clause 5 of the

Debian Social Contract The Debian Social Contract (DSC) is a document that frames the moral agenda of the Debian project. The values outlined in the Social Contract provide the basic principles for the Debian Free Software Guidelines that serve as the basis of the Open ...

(though Debian's democratic project management has seen this stance become a source of recurrent controversy). gNewSense, by contrast, does not provide any packages which depend on or suggest the use of non-free software, firmware, extensions, or plugins, nor does the gNewSense Project provide convenience-access to proprietary software for any reason, seeing this as an abrogation of the commitment to the development of free software solutions. Similar to Debian, gNewSense policies do not allow including documentation that are licensed under the

GNU Free Documentation License The GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL or simply GFDL) is a copyleft license for free documentation, designed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU Project. It is similar to the GNU General Public License, giving readers the r ...

with invariant sections. This includes many manuals and documentation released by the

GNU Project The GNU Project () is a free software, mass collaboration project announced by Richard Stallman on September 27, 1983. Its goal is to give computer users freedom and control in their use of their computers and Computer hardware, computing devi ...

themselves. While gNewSense was initially forked from Ubuntu (itself originally a fork of

) as a result of founding developer Paul O'Malley's prior work with Ubuntu, as of gNewSense 3.0 the distribution has tracked Debian as the base for its software distribution. In part this has been because the Debian Project does carefully disaggregate the free software in its official distribution from the proprietary software it provides courtesy access to. Indeed, many of the packages, including Debian-particular packages (such as Iceweasel and Icedove) ported to gNewSense are simply modified in such a way that they no longer provide such courtesy access to non-free software options.

Limitations

Since gNewSense's repositories contain only free software, support for hardware which requires firmware and for which no free firmware exists (such as some

wireless network A wireless network is a computer network that uses wireless data connections between network nodes. Wireless networking is a method by which homes, telecommunications networks and business installations avoid the costly process of introducing c ...

cards) is not available. By 1 May 2008,

3D graphics 3D computer graphics, or “3D graphics,” sometimes called CGI, 3D-CGI or three-dimensional computer graphics are graphics that use a three-dimensional representation of geometric data (often Cartesian) that is stored in the computer for th ...

and application support had also been removed because of licensing issues with Mesa 3D. After January 13, 2009, those issues had been resolved and 3D support became standard starting with the 2.2 release.

Reception

In reviewing gNewSense 3.0 in August 2013, Jesse Smith of

noted that many of the applications provided, including OpenOffice.org 3, Debian's de-blobbed 2.6.32 Linux kernel (based on

Linux-libre Linux-libre is a modified version of the Linux kernel that contains no binary blobs, obfuscated code, or code released under proprietary licenses. In the Linux kernel, they are mostly used for proprietary firmware images. While generally re ...

''tools''), Iceweasel 3.5 and GNOME 2.30 were quite out of date. Smith concluded this review with the following words:

Generally speaking, I was happy with gNewSense 3.0. Being based on Debian, the distribution can be counted on to provide both stability and amazing performance. The distribution is lean, fast and uncluttered. The flip side to this is gNewSense's system installer and default package management tools are geared more toward experienced users and will probably provide a steep learning curve to novice Linux users. Not much is automated and there is a minimum of hand holding. The main feature of gNewSense, the lack of proprietary software, is also a double-edged blade. On the one hand, it means the entire operating system can be audited, modified and redistributed. This is great from the perspective of software freedom. The fact that the distribution can play most multimedia formats and handled Flash content fairly well is a testament of the power of free and open source software. The one problem I ran into with gNewSense's software policy was with regards to my wireless network card. Most distributions ship with the non-free Intel firmware, but gNewSense doesn't include it and this means the distribution isn't a good fit with my laptop. It is, on the other hand, a great match with my desktop system.

Richard Stallman Richard Matthew Stallman (; born March 16, 1953), also known by his initials, rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to u ...

, founder and former president of the

, said he used gNewSense in January 2010 and he was still using it in April 2014. Since then Stallman has switched to Trisquel. Serdar Yegulalp reviewed gNewSense for InfoWorld. He is said: In the post on Network World of gNewSense 3.1 in February 2014, Bryan Lunduke reviewed this Linux distribution with following words:

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Gnewsense 2006 software Debian-based distributions Free software only Linux distributions Linux distributions Operating system distributions bootable from read-only media